Employment is down in your fair land. People who should be working in their first two or three jobs, aren't. They aren't gaining that education in work skills and process. The participants in your economic system are becoming institutionally less capable of performing.

That's an exaggeration of course. I did "learn" stuff, just you know...nothing practical outside of the bare basics (ie reading/writing/basic math). Once I left school, aka the asylum/aka daycare, it dawned on me, especially when it comes to how the industry/employers operate and the basic necessities of life.

....unless the union thinks it has the leverage to gain more concessions. I hear the average salary will now be about $100,000.

For public unions, those 'bad conditions' are the will of an electorate, expressed through a democratically elected government. Strikes in this instance are inherently an attempt to contravene the democratic process through mass extortion.

There is widespread agreement that one of the most reliable ways to improve the quality of K-12 instruction in the United States is to increase average teacher quality. But this raises two crucial and interrelated questions: (1) how should we measure teacher quality? And once we agree on (1), (2) how should we actually go about increasing average teacher quality?

Conventional measures of teacher quality include years of experience and attainment of advanced degrees. These are the indicators that are entrenched in salary schedules in school districts across the country, and that have been adamantly defended by teachers unions. Yet as Duke University economist Jacob Vigdor has found, the value of additional years of experience increases rapidly in the first few years before leveling off and advanced degrees appear to have no impact on effectiveness in the classroom.

As Marcus Winters recounts in an article in the Fall 2012 issue of National Affairs, there is another approach to assessing teacher quality:

Value-added analysis predicts how well a student should perform in a given year based on a series of observable factors that are related to his academic achievement, but are beyond a teacher’s control — factors such as race, gender, and family income. The analysis then compares for each teacher the estimate of how well his students were expected to perform at the end of the school year given the characteristics they brought into the classroom with their actual test scores in the spring. The teacher’s VAM score represents his performance in standard-deviation units relative to the average teacher (the mean VAM score) in the school system; the mean score is set at zero. If a teacher’s students tend to outperform expectations on average, then the teacher’s VAM score will come back as positive; if students perform worse than expected given their characteristics, the teacher will receive a negative VAM score.

It is easy to understand why teachers might resist value-added analysis. Winters gives careful consideration to arguments against value-added analysis, and he is very open about its weaknesses. He nevertheless sees it as an important step forward.

My own strong preference would be for pluralism in this space. That is, different schools will pursue different business models, and teachers will negotiate their contracts as individuals in keeping with their needs and ambitions. But value-added analysis is designed to offer an alternative to conventional measures of teacher quality that is similarly compatible with centralized school governance and collective bargaining. This disagreement is perhaps best seen through the lens of Neerav Kingsland’s contrast between “relinquishers,” who aim to relinquish the power of centralized bureaucracies in favor of a wide array of instructional providers, and “reformers,” who aim to improve the performance of centralized systems.

One thing that is interesting about the shift from our aforementioned (1) to (2) is that teachers unions tend to emphasize higher compensation levels and smaller class sizes as the best way to improve average teacher quality. The idea, as I understand it, is that higher compensation levels will allow public schools to attract and retain better teachers, or rather to give teachers the respect they deserve, etc. Smaller class sizes, meanwhile, will improve teacher effectiveness.

There is a problem with this line of thinking. Reducing class sizes will mean increasing hiring, which will increasing the compensation budget for school districts even if compensation levels remain the same. To increase class sizes at the same time that we increase compensation levels would mean either allowing compensation to crowd out other educational expenditures or increasing educational budgets. The decidedly ambiguous evidence in favor of reduction suggests that this is not a good bet, particularly since it would be far easier to increase compensation levels if we allowed for somewhat higher student-teacher ratios.

If we instead allowed the most effective teachers to take on more students in exchange for more compensation, as under the Gold Star Teachers proposal, we could rapidly improve the quality of teaching experienced by the median student. But of course something like the Gold Star Teachers proposal in an existing school district — as opposed to a “relinquished” charter school district — would have to rest on something like value-added analysis.

If we instead allowed the most effective teachers to take on more students in exchange for more compensation, as under the Gold Star Teachers proposal, we could rapidly improve the quality of teaching experienced by the median student.

And the burnout experienced by the effective teachers.

But of course something like the Gold Star Teachers proposal in an existing school district — as opposed to a “relinquished” charter school district — would have to rest on something like value-added analysis.

You know, the intensity of the stupid surrounding this debate suggests that once people leave education, they get dumber. It's supposed to work the other way though. Like, the miserably stupid misers politicing this debate are supposed to know they are offering exactly nothing to teachers. There isn't any particular place to be promoted to if you're a teacher, you just get class after class, year after year, and whatever effort you put into increasing the value offered in your classroom is by and large invisible. What's more, these days there's proposals out there to equate value with immediate test scores. No, teacher, you didn't prepare a foundation for later development, you made someone take a test.

You know what else, if business really did rely on such super excellent philosophies as "fix the workers, not the system they work in", well, then, I can see how they'd be this stupid in discussions of teaching.

And the other thing, the actual solution? If you create classrooms that are attractive to young teachers (smaller class sizes, higher through put, more chances to learn as well as to teach) and also create something for older teachers to be promoted to on merit and somehow still be productive enough to be worth paying, you can offer low wages and get great teachers. And then you would actually be looking at a system with a sufficiently minimal similarity to "business" that you could actually use all these stupidly inappropriate ideas like productivity and value-added.

Disco, it's great that you're reflecting the moribund, cornered views of republicans running from their own creations. Everyone needs a chance to see how inadequate their self-appointed leadership class actually is. But the sheer blow-dried, square-jawed, white manness of it is just too inbred. These mannequins are nobody.

If we instead allowed the most effective teachers to take on more students in exchange for more compensation, as under the Gold Star Teachers proposal, we could rapidly improve the quality of teaching experienced by the median student.

This proposal offers to reward effective teachers by giving them poorer conditions. I imagine the writer must have passed a lot of standardized tests.

This proposal offers to reward effective teachers by giving them poorer conditions. I imagine the writer must have passed a lot of standardized tests.

A couple of the articles about the recent strike referenced the educational system in Finland, whose students consistently perform near best in the world, without the use of standardized testing. I have mentioned this myself on this or some other thread. Apparently Finnish teachers come from the top of their university graduating classes, unlike ours. Part of our problem may be that we don't try to attract the right candidates to teaching - bright college students who actually want to teach. I wonder what teacher compensation is like in Finland? Do they get the equivalent of the $100K salaries that Lowtech mistakenly projects for the Chicago teachers? Perhaps they aren't worth it, but how much would we be willing to pay a teacher who really is outstanding? What would it take to attract our best and brightest to the job??

I've been called a criminal, a terrorist, and a threat to the known universe. But everything you were told is a lie. The truth is, they've taken our freedom, our home, and our future. The time has come for all humanity to take a stand...

A couple of the articles about the recent strike referenced the educational system in Finland, whose students consistently perform near best in the world, without the use of standardized testing. I have mentioned this myself on this or some other thread. Apparently Finnish teachers come from the top of their university graduating classes, unlike ours. Part of our problem may be that we don't try to attract the right candidates to teaching - bright college students who actually want to teach. I wonder what teacher compensation is like in Finland? Do they get the equivalent of the $100K salaries that Lowtech mistakenly projects for the Chicago teachers? Perhaps they aren't worth it, but how much would we be willing to pay a teacher who really is outstanding? What would it take to attract our best and brightest to the job??

I find two main points about the Finnish system resonate with what I believe is needed to have a good education system:

Their teachers are the top 10% of their class.

The curriculum is flexible.

You get smart people doing what they do best in a flexible system, and you're going to get good results.

In the US, teachers come from near the bottom of the class, and a Ph.D. in Education has been a subject of jokes for decades. You get average or below-average achievers, put them in an inflexible system, and you end up with what we have today in too many places. There are exceptional schools/districts, but I suspect one would find that those are the ones which most closely match the two points I list above.

An argument is two people sharing their ignorance.

A discussion is two people sharing their understanding, even when they disagree.